items tagged with Mark Ruffalo

Movies such as Flightplan are hell to review. How do I explain, exactly, why the film doesn’t work without giving away the plot secrets that prevent it from working? Like last fall’s already-forgotten The Forgotten, director Robert Schwentke’s airborne thriller involves a missing child. During a trans-Atlantic flight from Berlin to America, Jodie Foster’s newly widowed Kyle lays her six-year-old daughter Julia (Marlene Lawston) down for a nap, falls asleep herself, and wakes to find the girl missing. Obviously, escape from the plane is impossible, but Julia is nowhere to be found, and, more disturbingly, no one on the flight seems to remember her being aboard. Could Julia have merely been a figment of Kyle’s imbalanced imagination?

2005's Alternative Oscars: The Shoulda-Been ContendersWritten By: Mike SchulzSection: MoviesCategory: Feature Stories2005-02-16 00:00:00After the announcement of last year’s Oscar nominations, in which the Academy made almost shockingly inspired choices across the board, this year’s slate of nominees was bound to be a more predictable lot; barring a few minor surprises – the director and screenplay nods for Mike Leigh’s Vera Drake (still unseen by me) chief among them – voters opted for traditional, safe choices in 2004, especially among the squarer-than-usual Best Picture contenders.
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2004 in MoviesWritten By: Mike SchulzSection: MoviesCategory: Feature Stories2005-01-12 00:00:00Was I feeling especially sensitive in 2004, or were the year’s most memorable cinematic works, coincidentally, the most unabashedly romantic ones? It could certainly be me – the only (fictional) televised event that moved me to tears was the unlikely but enormously satisfying kiss between Martin Freeman’s Tim and Lucy Davis’ Dawn on The Office Special.
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Collateral’s plot is so High Concept you can barely believe it hasn’t been filmed before: A cab driver (Jamie Foxx) unknowingly picks up a hired assassin (Tom Cruise) as a fare, and spends a long, strange evening chauffeuring him from one execution site to another, all the while trying to prevent the killer from performing his rounds without, of course, getting himself killed in the process.